Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers

Ballroom Marfa is proud to present Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers, the first major traveling exhibition for the artist, featuring new and recent works made over the last five years. The exhibition opens May 1, 2026 and continues through October 11, 2026.

For this iteration, Ballroom Marfa has commissioned the artist to develop site-responsive additions to the exhibition that will offer a fresh perspective on Halfmoon’s exploration of memory, ancestry, and form. The title of the exhibition, Flags of Our Mothers, is a tribute to the matriarchs in her life and all the Indigenous women, who over many centuries, have created and endured, keeping their stories and traditions present, active, and alive.

Opening weekend, May 1–2, 2026, will feature a series of celebratory programs, including an artist talk with Halfmoon and her long-time collaborator, sculptor Tony Marsh, joined by the exhibition’s original curators, Amy Smith-Stewart, and Rachel Adams. Guests will also have the opportunity to experience a community meal by Cherokee Chef Nico Albert of Burning Cedar Sovereign, along with live music by Night Beats, culminating in an immersive weekend that merges art, food, and ceremony in the high desert.

Halfmoon’s practice spans torso-scaled and colossal-sized glazed stoneware sculptures, with their enormous scale and visual power opposing existing stereotypes and biases to create new monuments that honor the artist’s Caddo Nation ancestors and their traditions, including her elders from whom she learned about ceramics as a teenager. Inspired by ancient Indigenous pottery, specifically Caddo pottery traditions, the colossal Olmec stone heads in Mexico, the Moai statues on Easter Island, and the major earth mounds her Caddo ancestors erected as temples, tombs, and residences for tribal leaders and priests, Halfmoon fuses Caddo pottery traditions (a history of making mostly done by women) with more contemporary gestures—often tagging her work (a reference also to Caddo tattooing and ancient pottery motifs). Her works reference stories of the Caddo Nation, specifically her feminist lineage and the power of its complexities.

Working mainly in portraiture and hand building each work using a coil method, Halfmoon’s surfaces are expressive and show deep finger impressions and dramatic dripping glazes—a physicality that presents her as both maker and matter. Her specific palette matches both the clay bodies she selects and the glazes she fires with—reds (after the Oklahoma soil and the blood of murdered Indigenous women), blacks (referencing the natural clay native to the Red River), and buff creams. Oftentimes she stacks and repeats imagery, creating totemic forms that represent herself and her maternal ancestry while also referencing the multiplicities that exist inside all of us.

Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers is organized by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. The exhibition is curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, Diana Bowes Chief Curator at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Rachel Adams, Chief Curator and Director of Programming at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Generous support for this project provided by Art Bridges.

Events
Opening reception: May 1, 5–8pm

Artist talk: May 2, 11am–12:30pm

Community meal: May 2, 1–3pm
Food by Cherokee Chef Nico Albert of Burning Cedar Sovereign at Capri
603 W San Antonio St Marfa, TX 79843

Live music: May 2, 8pm
Music by Night Beats at Capri
603 W San Antonio St Marfa, TX 79843

About the Artist
Raven Halfmoon was born in 1991 in Norman, Oklahoma, where she presently lives and works. She is a member of the Caddo Nation, a federally recognized Tribal Nation headquartered in Binger, Oklahoma with a rich history of many thousands of years in the Southeastern region of the United States. Halfmoon received her BFA from the University of Arkansas, where she double majored in ceramics and cultural anthropology.

About Ballroom Marfa
Founded in 2003 by Virginia Lebermann and Fairfax Dorn, Ballroom Marfa is an internationally recognized, non-collecting contemporary art museum and performance space housed in a 1920s-era ballroom in Marfa, a rural town of fewer than 2,000 people in Far West Texas. Offering free cultural programming, Ballroom commissions new work, collaborates across disciplines, and produces exhibitions, public artworks, performances, screenings, concerts, symposia, educational programs, and publications rooted in Marfa’s borderland setting. Since its founding, Ballroom has partnered with more than 950 artists, filmmakers, and musicians to present over 60 exhibitions and more than 180 concerts and performances. Bull Room, Ballroom’s new performance venue, expands the organization's impact by creating a dedicated, flexible space that deepens community engagement, supports more ambitious programming, and strengthens Marfa's role as a contemporary arts destination. For more information, visit ballroommarfa.org.

About Art Bridges Foundation
Art Bridges Foundation is the vision of philanthropist and arts patron Alice Walton. Founded in 2017, Art Bridges creates and supports projects that share works of American art with communities across the United States and its territories. Art Bridges partners with a growing network of over 300 museums—impacting 25 million people nationwide—to provide financial and strategic support for exhibitions, collection loans, and programs designed to educate, inspire, and deepen engagement with local communities. The Art Bridges Collection represents an expanding vision of American art from the 19th century to present day and encompasses multiple media and voices. For more information, visit artbridgesfoundation.org.